RBWells @ RBWells @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

"Woah, those apples look so good! Which ones are they? "

"I can never tell if a watermelon is ripe, can you?"

When I am buying something, often someone will say "have you tried that before? What is it like?"

Stuff like that. Small talk. We aren't machines, we are social animals who interact with each other. I do think people are quick to discount the value of weak social interaction, shallow relationships, and focus on deep friendships and romantic ones, but those weak connections are so valuable too. They are like a glue for a community, connections that don't demand much from you.

I'm far from extroverted and moderately socially awkward, but still my life is so much better when I look up and say hi to people.

Do you talk to men you don't know in public? Small talk, or jokes at a bar? In the grocery store? Why wouldn't you talk to women? I am a woman and have daughters and none of us is offended by this, nor even the hypersensitive one, not even the lesbian. It's friendly talk.

It's harassment if you don't stop when you get a rejection. It's harassment if you sidle up with some horrifying personal comment about her body, or grab her arm and make her listen. You aren't going to do any of that. Small talk is not harassment, flirting is not harassment.

You are right in one way - it was bad that guys used to be able to say anything with absolute impunity, and women couldn't stop them, I was around for the end of that. Those guys didn't treat women like people, but in a way, neither are you, right? We are just people, talk to us like people.

Training. I sold things at a market on weekends and told my kids it was "remedial sales and social skills training". I'm still not a social butterfly by any stretch, but fake it till you make it helped me to be more comfortable talking to people.

I like it on corn. Cheese grits with cheddar & nutritional yeast; on popcorn OMG like it better than Parmesan (and I say this as a woman fascinated by cheese) and on corn on the cob.

I do not like it on tofu as sub for scrambled eggs. Nope. Mostly use it for grits and popcorn.

Just had refried beans (just cumin & salt) today in breakfast burritos (eggs, potatoes, beans, onion, cilantro, cheese, salsa - we only eat once or twice a day on weekends and cook better stuff) and yeah pintos are one of my favorites.

Channa masala

Black beans on yellow rice is my kids' favorite, they love black beans.

Red beans (cooked from dry with whatever veg we have) and long grain white rice with hot sauce like Tabasco.

I really like pintos on brown rice with tahini sauce but nobody else in my household likes it.

Chopped raw sweet onion on all of them.

I'm not THAT old but have worked for long enough to remember smoking offices. Like, people smoking at their desks.

I've surely experienced a decline in aggression in my workplaces over my career but think it has more to do with getting better jobs over time. An office is different from a flea market, restaurant, or retail.

Beans and rice are so healthy and cheap, with so many variations. It's always beans and rice for me.

Well, in my family of now just 4 we do have 2 cars because my husband and I each had one when we married. Nowadays this is the commute.

Mornings:

I take the bike

College kid takes my car, drops off high school kid then drives to her school

Husband takes his car to work

There is actually a direct city bus from our neighborhood to both the University and the high school, but because both are farther than my work and they run so infrequent it makes them need to leave so early, so I let the kids use the car.

(When there was one car it was a bigger loop sometimes, or sometimes there is a school bus available, so the kids can take that. Or the school was sometimes only a mile or two (3k or so) then the kids walk.)

Evenings:

I take the bike

Husband drives

College kid drives

High school kids gets a ride from a friend or takes the city bus BUT that bus comes only once an hour so if he misses it, he will walk, about 4 miles.

In my city, there are buses, but because there's sprawl to the edges of the huge county, and all the people in the suburbs drive and don't want buses, and the county (not the city) is in charge of transportation, it's starved to the point of near impossible inconvenience.

There are plenty of people living inside the city now, we've got a nice downtown, with people living there, but at this point it's all set up to favor automobiles. Like I intentionally live in a short walk distance to bus stops that could get me anywhere the buses go, but I use the electric bike and can get anywhere faster than the bus. Transfers are so bad because the buses are so infrequent.

My kids enjoyed "Evil Bong" and "Evil Bong 2" they are awful but still kind of funny and quite amusing in their way.

Well yeah. Obviously as colonized land there was, and probably still is, absolutely sickening brutality, and not as long ago as it would have happened in Europe. I just mean that France is unapologetic about enculturating kids even now, and standardizing, keeping a more stable culture.

We tend in the Americas, not just the US, to be more ever changing in culture, we adopt foreigners and they change us and we like that (or most of us do) and there are more pockets of different cultures.

I really don't know, and I live here. I think it's just baked into the culture. Like there is too much indulgence in tribalism, it's not smacked down but wink wink nod nodded.

My kids' friends are a diverse bunch and don't seem to judge anybody by their coloring so hopefully it's easing.

I think in France it's because they enforce French-ness, right? They make laws against wearing religious dress in school, they push for conformity, they teach kids to be French. It's almost like a religion. We don't have the same homogenous culture here, not that it's any sort of excuse for bigotry.

Yeah sometimes I use the mixer, finally got one big and strong enough to handle the 2 kg of dough I am usually working with (for 2 big loaves) and I love it!

But then rest the dough, stretch it a couple of times, let it rise, shape into baskets and either rise again and bake, or retard it in the fridge overnight or even longer, depending on schedule.

I had a bread maker and it drove me batty, it was like Schrodinger's bread box. Put ingredients in, and then no control over what happens. Maybe bread, maybe brick, no way to adjust it. I gave it to the neighbor because it was causing anxiety.

Now, for quite a few years I do make sourdough.(long enough my high school age kids can't remember before I did) . That is bread making. A long runway to adjust the timing, and really at any point you can throw it in the fridge and go to work, start again when you have time. And plenty of opportunity to touch the dough to understand what it needs. Near 100% success with this, vs. about 60% with yeasted dough and bread maker.

This depends. But based on how much I have, one of these:

Open a small bar/tapas place in my neighborhood.

Travel

Do what I do when not working - garden, read, exercise, take care of the land & the animals, go see live music.

Well it hasn't happened yet but if house prices collapse, it will be good as long as we can keep our jobs. So many people I know work here but can't buy a house. I bought my first in a market crash in the 1990s. He's been so bad for the economy, I am hoping the house values crash.

Yeah I got "wow, I could hit that by throwing a dart from across the room!" I am a favorite of phlebotomists, and I guess could be a successful junkie.

Chat > face to face > video call > call

But the last two are a near tie, and way worse than the first two.. Phone calls are the worst.

Well, that's ten minutes of my life I'd like back. Thanks though. Does he ever listen? Ever?

I do also balance the carton. Not always absolute symmetry but don't want someone to drop them.